The present invention relates generally to sheet or document stacking machines and more particularly to a low-speed sheet or document stacking machine which is capable of stacking sheets or documents, characterized by varying thicknesses, dimensions, textures or surface finishes, in the original sequential order in which the documents were initially fed into the machine.
Within various commercial establishments, the need for low-speed document stacking apparatus is of paramount importance in order to achieve an efficient administrative processing operations. In addition, the stacking apparatus must be capable of processing documents having quite diverse characteristics, e.g. varying thicknesses, dimensions, textures and surface finishes, such that all of the documents may be processed continuously. Otherwise, documents having similar characteristics would be required to be preliminarily separated from the remaining documents and then each separate stack of documents processed. This obviously necessitates multiple handling procedures and an inordinate expenditure of personnel time.
Banks and other similar institutions, for example, are required to process a multitude of different documents pertaining to their daily customer operations. Such documents may include, for example, checks drawn on banks located throughout the world, deposit slips, payment coupons, debit notices, shipping memoranda accompanying new checks and the like. Such documents will, of course, be of various sizes amd will have varying thickness, textures and surface finishes. The need is therefore apparent for machinery which can continuously process such diverse documents in conjunction with, for example, scanning, verifying, counting or other similar apparatus, and stack the documents in the original sequential order in which the documents are initially fed from such auxiliary scanning or the like apparatus.